stick, seats. To drive, you used a metal stick that interlocked with the front axle so you could steer it as you ran, the vehicle creaking ahead, its not-exactly-circular wheels leaving wobbly tracks in the dust. Over the years, as the dump filled up with better rubbish, these toy vehicles got fancier, updated with tin-can panels and rubber wheels and plastic headlights.
Jacob loved the Auto Department. Ever since he had discovered that half-wreck of an aeroplane at Lusaka City Airport four years ago, he had belonged to the electric world. He liked to make things in general, but nothing gave him greater pleasure than to galvanise them. No sound was more beautiful to his ears than the twitch-rattle-hum of an object coming to life in his hands. He could rejig a Discman, reassemble a foreign plug to fit a Zambian outlet, make a mixer spin its blades again by surgically removing a dead cockroach from its innards. But he lacked the bravado of the hawkers who strutted the roads, the ‘amplifiers’ who shouted the wares and prices of the market women. And what’s the use of goods you can’t sell?
* * *
Matha had long intended to force Godfrey to taste the brine she had wrung from her pillow every morning for the last three decades while she waited for him to come back to her. Then he showed up in her garden with some kind of death certificate, took one sip, and spat it right out. The night of his return, Matha sent their grandson out to find his own supper and invited Godfrey inside No. 74. They sat side by side on her bed, their arms brushing. A paraffin lamp shot gold into a corner. It was quiet but for the two-tone chant of the crickets and the mutter of rain outside.
Godfrey was issuing a chain of words, strung together with no logic but chronology: and then and then and then. Matha barely heard him. Where did you go? Where did you go? Where did you go? she was thinking. Finally, he implored her directly, ‘Matha, I was dying the bicycle was broken the Land Rover hit me…’ He trailed off. She looked at him. She bit her salty lips. She threw away her thinking and pulled his head to her chest.
They lay down together in her narrow bed. He didn’t kiss her, but he touched her wet eyes with his fingers. She ran her hand over his matted hair and the silken scar on his neck. She removed her jersey and chitenge and petticoat. He kept his tatty natty suit on, unzipping his fly when the time came, as if to take a piss. Her thighs ached as they rolled open, a yawning feeling in the tendons. As they rocked together, a distant pleasure stirred in her. The bed was creaking. Her shoulder was bumping the wall. Godfrey finished with a shudder. He rolled over, zipped up and fell asleep. Matha lay still, an acidic ache in her belly, squeezed in the gap between the bed and the wall. She closed her eyes and tried to remember.
* * *
At certain hours of the day, the traffic lassoing Kalingalinga tightened and knotted. In that listless slo-go, an albino girl would approach to beg through the windows. She was in her teens, bewitching and piteous both: her red-rimmed eyes looked raw yet exotic – rare in both senses – her scabby feet a special touch. Bazungu tourists and NGO workers in their cars were highly susceptible to her mewling. Little did they know that while they were busy mourning her plight and reaching into their pockets, the girl’s brother was slipping his arm, dark and slight as a shadow, through a back window to pluck out a purse or a briefcase or a rucksack.
Once he had his spoils, the siblings would grab hands and race away into the compound, deftly navigating the alleys between lean-tos and shacks and breezeblock cottages. Sometimes, before darting off, the girl stole an mbasela from her benefactors – a little token to sweeten the deal. Just as the Brit or the Australian or the Israeli handed her one or two pin of kwacha, she would reach up and snatch the glasses off the bridge of their pointy noses. Sunglasses, prescription glasses, prescription sunglasses – these would all sell well.
When Jacob first met the albino girl, she was wearing three pairs: tortoiseshell frames propped in her blonde afro, gold-rimmed bifocals around her neck, and aviator